Sister Creatures
A literary gyre with a small, religious Louisiana town at its center, Sister Creatures, Laura Venita Green’s dazzling debut novel, follows the interconnected stories of haunted, hopeful women.
Tess, ensconced in a longtime babysitting gig after dropping out of college, is deep in her day drinking and self-recrimination routine when Gail, a mysterious Pentecostal teenager, emerges from the woods to pop her charge’s dislocated shoulder into place. The girl is strange but unshakable. When Gail absconds with the other child’s doll in the morning, she leaves Tess with the threads of a story that she’ll spend the rest of her life trying to conclude.
Elsewhere in town, Tess’s former best friend, Lainey, struggles with the responsibilities implicit in helping to care for her gifted, troubled sister, Amelia. A choice looms before her, carrying with it the certainty of loss. And Olivia, though looking forward to college away from home, wrestles with her feelings for her older, resentful, and manipulative colleague, Nora.
Though the women drift away from the town over the years—forbidden to return, pulled out by forbidden love, or on quests they don’t fully understand—Pinecreek’s blood keeps beating within them. A thrilling, ever-changing metanarrative pulses beneath the central story too, through which Tess works to reconcile herself to the scars left by her brush with Gail. It’s a story of desire, escape, elusive love, and rescue; its evolving shape serves to tie the women’s stories together. In their respective corners of the world, they contend with loneliness, insatiability, imposter’s syndrome, and nostalgia, growing at an incremental rate and reshaping themselves in entrancing ways.
A sensuous and electric novel, Sister Creatures follows three Southern women as they run far from home, only to find that home’s patterns, prejudices, and particulars inform them everywhere.
Reviewed by
Michelle Anne Schingler
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